Just Desserts
In defense of popping in just for your favorite dessert
Not every restaurant has great dessert. That’s not surprising, as not every restaurant can employ a pastry chef or keep up with the exploding costs for ingredients like cocoa and vanilla.
The result is a $12 double scoop of poorly textured ice cream can spoil an otherwise excellent meal. I propose skipping that haphazardly constructed afterthought to take advantage of some of the best desserts the city has to offer. Here are the places I would recommend swinging by for your “Just Desserts”:
Dame
I’ve eaten at Dame once…or four times depending on who is counting. Before I ever had a full meal there, I popped in for tuna tartare and a slice of sticky toffee pudding. The host gave us 30 minutes to have our snack before a reservation, and we were out in 25. After an excellent full meal — finished with the two slices of sticky toffee pudding photographed above — the next two visits were only for NYC’s best iteration of the British classic, which uses a bit of salt to balance out both the velvety cream and the dessert’s trademark rich (but often overly sweet) toffee sauce.
Cosme
Enrique Olivera’s Cosme has been one of the city’s flagship restaurants for Mexican fine dining since 2014. While the signature corn husk meringue is no longer $12 as it was on that opening menu, it’s worth every penny of its now $22 price tag. Grab a seat at the bar and marvel at the ethereal corn mousse and burnt vanilla cream tucked instead of a large broken French-style merengue. It’s a texture delight, and my pick for the best dessert in New York City.
Quique Crudo
Around the time Cosme opened, another New York City Mexican restaurant was also receiving significant buzz and national attention. That was Casa Enrique, which became the first New York City Mexican restaurant to earn a Michelin star. Casa Enrique’s chef, Cosme Aguilar (who somewhat confusingly has no affiliation with the restaurant Cosme), opened his second restaurant, Quique Crudo, in the West Village in early 2024. The seafood-focused menu is uniformly excellent, and it’s worth braving the tightly packed, at times uncomfortable bar for a full dinner where you can watch Chef Aguilar and his team work their magic.
You could also pop in for a half hour to have my favorite ice cream in the city (or maybe anywhere?). There’s no dessert menu at Quique Crudo, so just ask for Chef Aguilar’s special preparation of the cheese ice cream, adorned with olive oil, citrus zest, and a citrus sauce. It comes in a panna cotta shape and shares some of the bouncier, pudding-esque characteristics of its look-alike.
Place des Fêtes
Place des Fêtes is better known for its natural wine program, sardine toast, and mussels en tinta than dessert, but it should not be overlooked. The star of the pastry program is a choux au craquelin that rotates seasonally. Iterations include banana and burnt orange, chocolate and miso caramel, and on my most recent visit, mascarpone and coffee. No matter the flavor, the choux is cut open rather than fully encased, and the craquelin top of the pastry takes on one of the flavors, bearing some resemblance to a concha. “Just Desserts” is harder at any spot on the weekends when availability is scarce, but it’s particularly difficult at PDF, which only saves a few rail seats for walk-ins on the weekends.
Pitt’s
Soufflés are a high-maintenance dessert, and the Pitt’s Pancake Soufflé is no exception. It must be ordered at the beginning of the meal and necessitates staff wearing earpieces like they’re in a spy movie in order to time the soufflé’s grand entrance to the table, where it is sliced open in a crisscross pattern and filled with maple syrup. To do “Just Desserts” here may disrupt this usual flow and therefore take longer than ordering a sundae (which is another fantastic dessert at Pitt’s). Use that time to order a cocktail from Ben Hopkins’ stellar program or to just admire the whimsical decorations throughout the space. Note that Pitt’s is temporarily closed for the winter but should be back in the spring.
Pitt’s Pancake Souffle
